CD.Arch, if its a matter of "challenging" for you. so be it. You've been challenging with lies, petty attacks, and your complete and utter lack of logic. You view this as you being challenging; I personally find it about you being challenged, morally-challenged and intellectually-challenged.
How can anyone not view an entity killing kids in the hundreds as a despicable, abhorrent entity that deserves to be isolated, cornered and condemned internationally?
As I said earlier, I do not agree with the civilian casualties. Much like Curtkram said, there are ways that Palestine could reduce the civilian casualties, and I think they should take that route, and not have fired missiles back. I know you disagree, but the years leading up to Israel's attacks right now have been chiefly attacks made by Palestine. I back the country of Israel, that doesn't mean I agree with everything they do. My biggest problem is with the way that you go about it, like condemning everyone and anyone that backs Israel and saying that they are racist. Zionism was originally put in place to protect Israel, and not to be racist. It was originally established in 1897 as a political organization. This is (obviously) before the late 1940's, which I believe is when you said Jews began to occupy Israel. Please correct me on that if I'm wrong. If that is true, then how were the intentions or results of Zionism racist? Why is it Zionism that has led to the destruction of Palestine? Also, why do you discredit the Palestinian attacks on Israel before Israel's attacks we see today? I respect your arguments, however I find them to be very flat as one sided. You do not take into account that the fight is two sided. I enjoy a little bit of intellectual challenge, so thank you.
I don't think Winston Churchill's definition is of a fanatic, more of someone thick headed, like myself. Or even Tammuz. Churchill only defined someone that believes in a cause and will debate it. The first one is more accurate. And I stated what my aim was led, so I don't see myself as a fanatic.
As I said earlier, I do not agree with the civilian casualties. Much like Curtkram said, there are ways that Palestine could reduce the civilian casualties,
So, you "don't agree" (whatever that means) with the (Palestinian) civilian casualties and yet instead of directly blaming the party responsible for shooting into the civilian population, killing, deliberately, intentionally, you blame the Palestinians themselves? Yes, I can see how your fit for intellectual challanges.
"and I think they should take that route, and not have fired missiles back. I know you disagree, but the years leading up to Israel's attacks right now have been chiefly attacks made by Palestine."
Prove it. Prove that Gaza was not under seige, prove that its population was not being near-starved, prove that they were being attacked every now , that Israel was assassinating Palestinians in Gaza well before this murderous spree,. Prove this guy wrong. And the greater picture? Prove that Palestinians were't terrorized, deported, displaced internally and deported externally. Prove that their lands werent stolen. Prove that Israelis didn't subject Palestinians to a system of systemic oppression, ghettoization, forced impoverishment. The onus is you to prove all this because the world community knows this, although their governments. You want to place the blame on the victim because you support the murderer for your own reasons - I understand that, your choice...but, its kind of difficult to sell this sort of psychopathic "reasoning" as being rational. So just be honest, and state that you don't really care about the Palestinian civilians - which you really aren't; if you were, your first and immediate concern would be the gun pointing at them- and that you're fine with them being eliminated. At least I would have more respect for you intellectually; you would be, as you are now, a psychopath, but at least without sleazily covering it up.
"My biggest problem is with the way that you go about it, like condemning everyone and anyone that backs Israel and saying that they are racist."
Whoever supports a racist ideology, and to top it a colonial racist ideology, is racist. How did I go about it? Did I insult your through character assassination, through pettiness? Not at all, I'm just calling it out as it is. If you're a pro-Zionist, you're a pro-racist colonial nationalism, you de facto become racist. If you render the Palestinian rights invisible because, as you say, you "support Israel", and you can't recognize the rights of Palestinians to be on their lands and to defend their right to be on their lands because you prefer Israel...then yes, you are racist. To be pro-Zionist is de facto to be anti-Palestinian; you let your ethnic and cultural preference rule your opinion, not human rights, which includes the rights to live without oppression, the right to ownership without violation, etc.
" Please correct me on that if I'm wrong. If that is true, then how were the intentions or results of Zionism racist? Why is it Zionism that has led to the destruction of Palestine?"
I've done your homework in many of my posts above (also refer to this page). If you haven't read them, read them, If you have read them and choose to ignore them, then it is not a question of you wanting to understanding but of you wanting to defend your irrational belief no matter what I have to say.
Here's a link;
http://www.tpnn.com/2014/07/23/video-everything-you-need-to-know-about-the-israeli-palestinian-conflict-easily-explained-in-five-minutes/
Sorry if it doesn't come out as a link
That video is of course based on pro-Zionist lies. 'Zionism always wanted to colonize Palestine entire (and even more). The only thing that "killed" (which was never really on the table for Israel) the two-state solution is the dispersal of settlement colonies calculated to rip Palestine apart. The talk of the two state solution has always been one of those mirages that get thrown around to trick and deceive. Below:
The notion of having a two-state solution established in the Land of Israel is now at a dead end; never in Jewish history have so many people talked so much and expended so much energy in something so futile,
Yesterday Naftali Bennett of the Jewish Home party became the latest member of Israel’s cabinet to call for an end to the pretense that a “two-state solution” could be a ‘solution’ in any sense.
The notion of having a two-state solution established in the Land of Israel is now at a dead end; never in Jewish history have so many people talked so much and expended so much energy in something so futile,
he said. Instead,
Bennett reiterated his stance that Israel should annex — “as quickly as possible” — virtually all the areas [Area C] that were not handed over the Palestinian Authority under the Oslo accords, including the Jewish communities and a handful of Palestinian towns. He further advocated that Israel devise “aggressive” new plans to drastically improve the economic well-being of both the Jewish and Arab inhabitants of Judea and Samaria.
Bennett said that Israel must continue its settlement activity in Judea and Samaria “in full force, because only facts on the ground would make everyone understand that it is an unrealistic proposition to have a Palestinian entity in the Land of Israel.”
Nomika Zion, a resident of the Israeli border town of Sderot and a member of the Israeli peace group Other Voice, recently asked in an open letter to Prime Minister Binyamin Netanyahu, "How has a nation that has occupied other people's territory for 45 years continued to tell itself, with such deep conviction, that we are the single and ultimate victim in this story?"
One answer is that Israel is a nation that from the beginning has justified its actions with myths.
First there was the myth of an empty land, a Palestine without Palestinians, where the Jewish survivors of the Holocaust found a desert and made it bloom. The people who had inhabited that land for centuries were erased from the record, along with their age-old olive trees and citrus orchards, their shops and businesses, villages and towns.
The founding myth, reinforced by the expulsion of nearly half a million Arabs, was followed by another: that Israel's neighbors were bent on driving the tiny state into the sea. Since Israel's survival is at stake, any action it takes to defend itself is therefore justified.
In 1967 the Israelis used the pretext of an imminent attack by Egypt to launch a war with that country, and proceeded to defeat three Arab armies and capture the West Bank, Gaza, and Syria's Golan Heights, acquiring valuable water sources as a result. Yet the myth of Israel's vulnerability lived on. Today, with Palestinians locked behind barriers and checkpoints, deprived of their freedom and at the mercy of the Israeli army, Israel remains the victim.That image, carefully nurtured by the Israel lobby, is reflected in Washington's pledge to assure Israel's military dominance in the region—regardless of the cost.
Furthermore, the two-state solution is, from my point of view unethical...for many reasons. Firstly, it will never be a solution. There will not be peace, not for anyone. Secondly, Palestinians have the right of return to their cities and villages anywhere in historic Palestine. This is where they owned property, this is where their lands were stolen.
Archinect, you continue to establish a state of normalcy with Israeli businesses and institutions that are enmeshed within a colonial racist system oppressing a whole people, killing children in their hundreds, destroying homes and livelihoods. You are indirectly contributing to this. Please boycott Israeli businesses and institutions.
Jul 25, 14 1:25 am ·
·
Archinect has nothing to do with sovereign states of the world.
Here, the only border is the borders of the internet because here there is no nations or countries. It is simply the domain of the information super highway.
This forum and website is simply borderless and open wherever there is an on ramp to the information super highway.
"As I said earlier, I do not agree with the civilian casualties. Much like Curtkram said, there are ways that Palestine could reduce the civilian casualties"
?
Sure they could, but can they trust Israel who doesn't even treat them as second class citizens under apartheid? Palestinians are forced to live in sort of "open air prisons."
There is a very clear progression of the history here. Everything, including theories, ideas and facts since the late 1800s are well recorded and archived. In them, you can see a lot of interference and unjust exchanges of land which still continues today via ever expanding settlements and illegal acquisitions. Turks have a considerable record of land deeds and parcel maps in their archives. Ottomans were pretty good at keeping records. Clearly, abduction of Moslem and Christian lands by British and later by Jewish settlers are well recorded and down to satellite images these days.
Now is the dirtiest of the deeds time. Considerable extermination is openly considered and started. The idea of getting rid of Palestinians forever is underway. This is what powers that be in Israel are putting their weight and efforts. How stupid of them. This is the beginning of the end of Israeli policies and Jewish conundrum in the region.
You can look at it positively. I do. In order for Jews to co-exist in the region for a long term, they have to make peace. A "just peace" that satisfies all Palestinians. Israel and Jewish diaspora are changing. It is a society with different political camps but all grew up with the threat of being wiped off. Afterall the impact of Holocaust is nowhere near of being forgotten and that is not only healthy for Jews but all of us regardless of religion, race and nationality to be aware of our evil nature.
I personally want Israel to survive and eradicate and learn from the bad blood between Israelis and Palestinians. I see a peaceful Israel as an asset to region but in the light of today's landscape I also feel sort of hopelessness and lack of vision in those who have access to armory, triggers and ammo.
It is urgent that Israel comes to terms with peace because the region is fast radicalizing itself like it never seen before. Forces like ISIS might soon be an established entity in Israel's doorstep and they will come not with Kassams and AK47's but much more lethal armory with techno accessories and battle experience perhaps turning the region into a bloodbath. This is happening at Israel's doorstep right now. And what Netanyahu and his fanatical cabinet are doing? Blowing up Palestinian women, children in Gaza and spending its whatever credibility and image like a nouveau riche wreckless bully.
Question is, will the population in Israel which is very westernized be able to stay in Israel and fight bloody wars against the most graphically brutal of the enemies continuously like a highly militarized warrior nation or opt out for a peaceful immigration to Spain, US or other places who will accept them with minimal immigration requirements? Do you see the dangers here? There is, so far, nobody here with the exception of tammuz, myself and few others addressed these dangers yet and made pleas for "just" peace and ultimately cared for Israel and the survival of the reason in the region.
Israeli hearts are brimming with concern for Israeli soldiers in Gaza; but they have no compassion for victims on the other side, not even for children who are dying in gruesome numbers.
“We want an international airport, we want a seaport, we want an opening to the outside world, and not the situation where we are controlled by a few border crossings that turn Gaza into a huge prison, where no one can leave even for medical treatment or to work […] When we get a clearly worded drafting that guarantees these things, and the international community gives its backing to this draft – than the fire can be stopped, even today..." -Hamas political bureau head Khaled Meshaal
From
http://mondoweiss.net/2014/07/jews-apartheid-israel.html
Statement of Jews for Palestinian Right of Return, July 22, 2014 (200 initial signers, endorsing allies forthcoming)
On July 12, 2014, Gaza civil society issued an urgent appeal for solidarity, asking: “How many of our lives are dispensable enough until the world takes action? How much of our blood is sufficient?”
As Jews of conscience, we answer by unequivocally condemning Israel’s ongoing massacre in Gaza, whose victims include hundreds of civilians, children, entire families, the elderly, and the disabled. This latest toll adds to the thousands Israel has killed and maimed since its supposed withdrawal from the Gaza Strip in 2005.
In response to this crisis, we urgently reaffirm our support for a ban on all military and other aid to Israel.
In 1967, Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. opposed the Vietnam War with his famous declaration: “For the sake of the hundreds of thousands trembling under our violence, I cannot be silent.”
Today, *we* cannot be silent as the “Jewish state” — armed to the teeth by the U.S. and its allies — wages yet another brutal war on the Palestinian people. Apartheid Israel does not speak for us, and we stand with Gaza as we stand with all of Palestine.
In the face of incessant pro-Israel propaganda, we heed Malcolm X’s warning: “If you’re not careful, the newspapers will have you hating the people who are being oppressed, and loving the people who are doing the oppressing.”
For Israel’s relentless war on Gaza is no more an act of “self-defense” than such infamous massacres as Wounded Knee (1890), Guernica (1937), the Warsaw Ghetto (1942), Deir Yassin (1948), My Lai (1968), Soweto (1976), Sabra and Shatila (1982), or Lebanon (2006).
Rather, it is but the latest chapter in more than a century of Zionist colonialism, dispossession, ethnic cleaning, racism, and genocide — including Israel’s very establishment through the uprooting and displacement of over 750,000 Palestinians during the 1947-1948 Nakba. Indeed, eighty percent of the 1.8 million people sealed into Gaza are refugees.
Like any colonial regime, Israel uses resistance to such policies as an excuse to terrorize and collectively punish the indigenous population for its very existence. But scattered rockets, fired from Gaza into land stolen from Palestinians in the first place, are merely a response to this systemic injustice.
From To confront the root cause of this violence, we call for the complete dismantling of Israel’s apartheid regime, throughout historic Palestine — from the River to the Sea. With that in mind, we embrace the 2005 Palestinian call for Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions (BDS) campaign, which demands:
* An end to Israeli military occupation of the 1967 territories
* Full equality for Palestinian citizens of Israel
* Right of return for Palestinian refugees, as affirmed by UN resolution 194
Contd
Sign petition at http://chn.ge/1o76rOC
Initial Signers (list in formation; organizations, schools and other affiliations shown for identification only; *Co-founder, Jews for Palestinian Right of Return)
Avigail Abarbanel, Psychotherapist; editor, Beyond Tribal Loyalties: Personal Stories of Jewish Peace Activists (2012, Cambridge Scholars), Inverness, ScotlandNoa Abend, Boycott From WithinStephen Aberle, Independent Jewish Voices; Vancouver, BCLisa Albrecht, Ph.D. Social Justice Program, University of MinnesotaAnya Achtenberg, novelist and poet; teacher; activist; International Jewish Anti-Zionist NetworkMike Alewitz, Associate Professor, Central CT State Unversity; Artistic Director, Labor Art & Mural ProjectZalman Amit, Distinguished Professor Emeritus; Author, Israeli RejectionismAnthony ArnoveGabriel Ash, International Jewish Anti-Zionist Network, SwitzerlandTed Auerbach, Brooklyn for PeaceAnna Baltzer, author and organizerRonnie Barkan, Co-founder, Boycott from Within, Tel-AvivJudith Bello, Administrative Committee, United National Antiwar CoalitionLawrence Boxall, Independent Jewish Voices, Canada; Vancouver Ecosocialist GroupLinda BenediktNora Barrows-Friedman, journalist; OaklandProf. Jonathan Beller, Humanities and Media Studies Graduate Program in Media Studies, Pratt Institute, BrooklynMedea Benjamin, co-founder, CODEPINKRica Bird, Joint Founder, Merseyside Jews for Peace and JusticeAudrey Bomse, Co-chair, National Lawyers Guild Palestine SubcommitteeProf. Daniel Boyarin, Taubman Professor of Talmudic Culture, UC BerkeleyLenni Brenner, Author, Zionism In The Age Of The DictatorsElizabeth Block, Independent Jewish Voices, Toronto ONMax Blumenthal, Author, Goliath: Life and Loathing in Greater Israel; and Senior Writer for Alternet.orgMary P. Buchwald, Jewish Voice for Peace-New YorkMonique Buckner, BDS South AfricaMaia Brown, Health and Human Rights Project-Seattle & Stop Veolia SeattleEstee Chandler, Jewish Voice for Peace, Los AngelesRick Chertoff, L..A. Jews for PeaceProf. Marjorie Cohn, Thomas Jefferson School of Law; past president, National Lawyers GuildAlly Cohen, Ramallah, Palestine; International Solidarity Movement media coordinatorRuben Rosenberg Colorni, Youth for Palestine, NetherlandsMike Cushman, Convenor, Jews for Boycotting Israeli Goods (UK)Margaretta D’arcy, Irish actress, writer, playwright, and peace-activistNatalie Zemon DavisWarren Davis, labor and political activist, Philadelphia, PAEron DavidsonJudith Deutsch, Independent Jewish Voices Canada; Science for PeaceRoger Dittmann, Professor of Physics, Emeritus California State University, Fullerton; President, Scholars and Scientists without Borders Executive Council, World Federation of Scientific WorkersGordon Doctorow, Ed.D., CanadaMark Elf, Jews Sans Frontieres, London, UKHedy Epstein, Nazi Holocaust survivor and human rights activist; St. Louis, MOMarla ErlienShelley EttingerInge Etzbach, Human Rights Activist, Café Palestina NYRichard Falk, Professor of International Law, Emeritus, Princeton University; Former UN Special Rapporteur on Occupied Palestine, 2008-2014Malkah B. Feldman, Jewish Voice for Peace and recent delegate to Palestine with American Jews For A Just PeaceDeborah Fink, Co-Founder, Jews for Boycotting Israeli Goods UKJoel Finkel, Jewish Voice for Peace-ChicagoSylvia Finzi, JfjfP; Jüdische Stimme für gerechten Frieden in Nahost, EJJP. Germany)Maxine Fookson, Pediatric Nurse Practitioner; Jewish Voice for Peace, Portland OR-Richard Forer, Author, Breakthrough: Transforming Fear Into Compassion – A New Perspective on the Israel-PalestineSid Frankel, Associate Professor, University of ManitobaProf. Cynthia Franklin, Co-Editor, Biography: An Interdisciplinary Quarterly, University of Hawai’iRacheli Gai, Jewish Voice for PeaceHerb Gamberg, Independent Jewish Voices, CanadaRuth Gamberg, Independent Jewish Voices, CanadaLee GargaglianoCheryl Gaster, social justice activist and human right lawyer, Toronto ONAlisa Gayle-Deutsch, American/Canadian Musician and Anti-Israeli Apartheid ActivistJack Gegenberg, Professor of Mathematics, University of New Brunswick, Fredericton NBProf. Terri Ginsberg, film and media scholar, New YorkDavid Glick, psychotherapist; Jewish Voice for PeaceSherna Berger Gluck, Emerita Professor, CSULB; Israel Divestment CampaignNeta Golan, Ramallah, Palestine; Jews Against Genocide; Co-founder, International Solidarity Movement.Tsilli GoldenbergSteve Goldfield, Ph.D.Sue Goldstein, International Jewish Anti-Zionist Network, CanadaMarty Goodman, former Executive Board member, Transport Workers Union Local 100; Socialist ActionRabbi Lynn Gottlieb, Freeman Fellow, Fellowship of ReconciliationHector Grad, International Jewish Anti-Zionist Network, SpainProf. Jesse GreenerCathy GulkinIra Grupper, Bellarmine University, Louisville, KYJeff Halper, The Israeli Committee Against House demolitions (ICAHD)Larry Haiven, Independent Jewish Voices Canada, HalifaxEvelyn Hecht-Galinski, publisher, GermanyStanley Heller, The Struggle Video News TSVNShir Hever, Jewish Voice for Just Peace, GermanyDeborah Hrbek, media and civil rights lawyer, NLG-NYCDr. Tikva Honig-Parass, Jews for Palestinian Right of ReturnAdam Horowitz, Co-Editor, MondoweissGilad IsaacsSelma JamesJake Javanshir, Independent Jewish Voices, TorontoRiva JoffeVal Jonas, attorney, Miami BeachSima Kahn, MD; President of the board, Kadima Reconstructionist CommunityYael Kahn, Israeli anti-apartheid activistMichael KalmanovitzDan KaplanSusan Kaplan, J.D. National Lawyers GuildDanny Katch, activist and authorBruce Katz, President, Palestinian and Jewish Unity (PAJU), Montreal, CanadaLynn Kessler, Ph.D., MPH, psychologist/social justice activistJanet Klecker, Sonomans for Justice & Peace for Palestine, Sonoma CAProf. David Klein, California State University, Northridge; USACBIEmma Klein, Jewish Voice for Peace, Seattle WASara KershnarHarry KopytoRichard Koritz, veteran postal trade unionist and former member of North Carolina Human Relations CommissionYael Korin, PhD., Scientist at UCLA; Campaign to End IsraelI Apartheid, Southern CaliforniaDennis Kortheuer, CSULB, Israel Divestment CampaignSteve Kowit, Professor Emeritus, Jewish Voice for PeaceToby KramerJason Kunin, Independent Jewish Voices CanadaDr. David Landy, Trinity College, DublinJean Léger, Coalition pour la Justice et la Paix en Palestine, membre de la Coalition BDS Québec et de Palestiniens et Juifs UnisLynda Lemberg, Educators for Peace and Justice, Independent Jewish Voices, Toronto ONDavid Letwin,* activist and teacher, Al-Awda NYMichael Letwin,* former President, Association of Legal Aid Attorneys/UAW Local 2325; USACBI; Al-Awda NYLes Levidow, Jews for Boycotting Israeli Goods (J-BIG), UKCorey Levine, Human Rights Activist, Writer; National Steering Committee, Independent Jewish Voices CanadaJoseph Levine, Professor of Philosophy, University of Massachusetts AmherstLesley Levy, Independent Jewish Voices, MontrealMich Levy, teacher, Oakland CAAbby Lippman, Professor Emerita; activist; MontrealBrooke Lober, PhD candidate, University of Arizona, Gender and Women’s Studies DepartmentAntony Loewenstein, journalist, author and Guardian columnistJennifer Loewenstein, Professor of Middle Eastern Studies, University of Wisconsin, MadisonAlex Lubin, Professor of American Studies, University of New MeixcoAndrew Lugg, Professor Emeritus, University of Ottawa, CanadaDavid Makofsky, Jewish Voice for Peace, Research AnthropologistHarriet Malinowitz, Professor of English, Long Island University, BrooklynMike Marqusee, Author, If I Am Not for Myself: Journey of an Anti-Zionist JewMiriam Marton, JDDr. Richard Matthews. independent scholar, London ONDaniel L. Meyers, Former President National Lawyers Guild-NYCLinda Milazzo, Writer/Activist/Educator, Los AngelesEva Steiner Moseley, Holocaust refugee, Massachusetts Peace Action board member and Palestine/Israel Working GroupDr. Dorothy Naor, retired teacher, Herzliah, IsraelMarcy Newman, independent scholar; Author; The Politics of Teaching Palestine to AmericansAlex Nissen, Women in BlackDr. Judith NormanHenry Norr, retired journalist, Berkeley CAMichael Novick, Anti-Racist Action-Los Angeles/People Against Racist TerrorProf. Bertell OllmanKarin PallyProf. Ilan Pappé, Israeli historian and socialist activistKaren Platt, Jewish Voice for Peace, Albany CADr. Susan Pashkoff, Jews Against Zionism, London UKMiko Peled, writer, activist; Author, The General’s Son: Journey of an Israeli in PalestineProf. Gabriel PiterbergMitch Podolak, Founder, Winnipeg Folk Festival and Vancouver Folk Music FestivalKaren Pomer,* granddaughter of Henri B. van Leeuwen, Dutch anti-Zionist leader and Bergen-Belsen survivorLenny PotashFabienne Presentey, Independent Jewish Voices, MontréalDiana Ralph, Independent Jewish Voices CanadaRoland Rance, Jews Against Zionism, LondonKaren Ranucci, Independent Journalist, Democracy Now!Ana Ratner, Artist, Puppeteer, Activist.Michael Ratner, President Emeritus, Center for Constitutional RightsProf. Dr. Fanny-Michaela ReisinDiana M.A. Relke, Professor Emerita, University of SaskatchewanProf. Bruce Robbins, Columbia UniversityStewart M. Robinson, retired Prof of MathematicsProfessor Lisa RofelMimi Rosenberg, Producer & Host, Building Bridges and Wednesday Edition, WBAI 99.5 FM; Association of Legal Aid Attorneys/UAW Local 2325Lillian Rosengarten, Author, From The Shadows Of Nazi Germany To The Jewish Boat To GazaProf. Jonathan Rosenhead, British Committee for the Universities of Palestine (BRICUP)Yehoahua RosinIlana RossoffMartha Roth, Independent Jewish Voices; Vancouver BCMarty Roth, Emeritus professor of English, University of MinnesotaRuben Roth, Assistant Professor, Labour Studies, Laurentian University; Independent Jewish Voices CanadaEmma RubinCheryl A. Rubenberg, Middle East Scholar; Editor, Encyclopedia of the Israeli-Palestinian Conflict; Author, The Palestinians in Search of a Just PeaceJosh Ruebner, Author, Shattered Hopes: Obama’s Failure to Broker Israeli-Palestinian PeaceMark Rudd, retired teacher, Albuquerque NMBen Saifer, Independent Jewish Voices CanadaEvalyn Segal, Sylvia SchwarzYossi SchwartzCarole Seligman, co-editor, Socialist Viewpoint magazineYom Shamash, Independent Jewish Voices, Vancouver, CanadaTali Shapiro, Boycott from Within; IsraelKaren Shenfeld, Poet, Toronto ONSid Shniad, National Steering Committee, Independent Jewish Voices CanadaWilliam Shookhoff, Independent Jewish Voices, Toronto ONMelinda Smith, Jewish Voice for Peace, Albuquerque NMKobi SnitzMarsha Steinberg, BDS-LA for Justice in Palestine, Los AngelesLotta StrandbergCarol Stone, Independent Jewish Voices, Vancouver BCMiriam (Cherkes-Julkowski) Swenson, Ph.D.Matthew TaylorLaura Tillem, Peace and Social Justice Center of South Central KansasPeter Trainor, Independent Jewish Voices, TorontoRebecca Tumposky,Darlene Wallach, Justice for Palestinians, San Jose CADr. Abraham Weizfeld, JPLOBonnie Weinstein, Co-Editor of Socialist Viewpoint magazine; Publisher, Bay Area United Against War NewsletterSam Weinstein, International Jewish Anti-Zionist Network-Labor; former President, UWUA Local 132Judith Weisman, Independent Jewish Voices; Not in Our Name (NION); Toronto ONPaul Werner, PhD, DSFS Editor, WOID, a journal of visual languageNoga Wizansky, Ph.D., artist, instructor, and researcher; Administrator, Institute of European Studies, UC BerkeleyMarcy Winograd, public school teacher, former congressional peace candidateBekah Wolf, UC Hastings College of Law Student; Co-founder, Palestine Solidarity ProjectSherry WolfDave Zirin, Author, Game Over: How Politics Have Turned the Sports World Upside Down
From :
http://imeu.org/article/the-nakba-65-years-of-dispossession-and-apartheid
65 Years of Apartheid in the Holy Land
Over the entirety of its 65-year existence, there has been a period of only about one year (1966-67) that Israel has not ruled over large numbers of Palestinians to whom it granted no political rights simply because they are not Jewish. From 1948 to 1966, Palestinian citizens of Israel were ruled by martial law, similar to the Israeli military regime that millions of Palestinians living in the occupied West Bank, East Jerusalem, and Gaza have been subject to since 1967.The United Nations International Convention on the Suppression and Punishment of the Crime of Apartheid (1973) defines apartheid as "inhuman acts committed for the purpose of establishing and maintaining domination by one racial group of persons over any other racial group of persons and systematically oppressing them."According to a 2010 Human Rights Watch report, "Separate and Unequal: Israel's Discriminatory Treatment of Palestinians in the Occupied Palestinian Territories":"Palestinians face systematic discrimination merely because of their race, ethnicity, and national origin depriving them of electricity, water, schools, and access to roads, while nearby Jewish settlers enjoy all of these state-provided benefits While Israeli settlements flourish, Palestinians under Israeli control live in a time warp - not just separate, not just unequal, but sometimes even pushed off their lands and out of their homes."Many Israelis, including senior political leaders, have compared Israel's military rule over Palestinians in the occupied territories to apartheid. One of the first people to use the word "apartheid" in relation to Israel was Israel's first prime minister, David Ben-Gurion, who warned following the 1967 War of Israel becoming an "apartheid state" if it retained control of the occupied territories.In 1999, then-Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Barak stated: "Every attempt to keep hold of this area [Israel and the occupied territories] as one political entity leads, necessarily, to either a nondemocratic or a non-Jewish state. Because if the Palestinians vote, then it is a binational state, and if they don't vote it is an apartheid state." In 2010, Barak repeated the apartheid comparison, stating: "As long as in this territory west of the Jordan river there is only one political entity called Israel it is going to be either non-Jewish, or non-democratic If this bloc of millions of Palestinians cannot vote, that will be an apartheid state."Others who have compared Israel's treatment of Palestinians to apartheid include former US President Jimmy Carter, who in 2006 published a book entitled, "Palestine Peace Not Apartheid," as well as many veterans of the anti-apartheid movement in South Africa, such as Archbishop Emeritus Desmond Tutu, one of the heroes of the struggle against South African apartheid, who has repeatedly made the comparison.
So... Tammuz, you reject the two state solution, and basically want Israel wiped off the map. Why, then, do they not have the right to fight back against people like yourself? Are you just mad because they won't like up neatly for you and be slaughtered?
If you really want a war with Israel, then grow a pair and go fight one... oh, that's right, you will lose. An Israeli tank will roll over your corpse seconds after you shout death to the infidel for the last time. So all you have left to do is call for a boycott on a forum that has nothing to do with the middle east...
Good that you're showing your true colours to others here, xian talking about my corpse being run over. And LITS4Forms telling me to strap a suicide belt and off myself. I'm glad you zionists show others your true selves. Not once have I wished or suggested or imagined anything of that sort to anyone, whether they share my opinion or not...but here you are, stuck in your hate-filled barbarism. Good job for exposing yourselves. Carry on with the good work. Counter information and reason with your irrational hate
You seem pretty good at cherry picking information in front of you and seeing only what you want to see. Other people see the same information and see how you've cherry picked it to create the picture you want, which is why you always sound like a nut, and you'll never be taken seriously.
Jul 25, 14 2:55 pm ·
·
Tammuz,
You think too binarily or black & white.
I am neither a zionist or an anti-zionist as the phrase is defined. Here is why?
I don't care whether there is an Israel or not or a Gaza strip or not. I can care less. Sure, I would prefer people to live and coexist in peace over killing and murdering. However, I don't control the will of those people there. They will do what they will do. If they don't want peace there will never be peace among them because they don't want it. They have to have sincere will for peace but if they don't it will never happen.
When I die, my soul will neither be in heaven, hell, Sheol, or Earth as depicted in the Bible, Torah, or the Qur'an. It will be elsewhere. That is as far as I will go.
Why are we even discussing this topic? I'm not your freedom fighter.
Bless you Richard but my comments were not targeted towards you. Please try to understand before criticizing on the basis of cliches that don't apply here. I could care less for religion - I bring this topic - a secular peaceful boycott of a racist colonial entity- in the midst of another chapter of genocide being committed against the Palestinians. Hundreds of children have been murdered . the number of overall casualties - the overriding majority of them civilian- is nearing a thousand. How many casualties on the Israeli side? And what percentage of them civilian?
Secondly, the larger picture: Who kicked whom out of their lands? Who stole whose land? Who is laying seige on a whole region, deliberately impoverishing them, near-starving them, turning water off them? Who is practicing a consistent policy of racial discrimination? Who creates massacre after massacre, whose sordid history is a list of massacres created against an indigenous people? Who is deceiving you with your media to portray this as a fight amongst equals, who deceives you with your media to make you assume this is about religion?
Who has the right to defend themselves against this oppression, against the slow murder of an entire people, country, culture called Palestine in order to set-up a racist colony?
Yes, I am absolutely binary because the history of Israel as a racist colony that came from europe with the intention, the power and the perseverence of kicking out the Palestinians to take over their lands is a binary one! There is absolutely no equivalence between the nature of an aggressor and a murdered and the victim who has all the right to defend themselves.
If you come back at me with the same redundant nonsense, please excuse me for not taking you seriously. I have taken the time to write this and I hope you take the time to let it sink in and then go do your own research if it interests you. Read the links that Im bothering to insert here and ponder over it. If it doesn't interest you, then you really dont need to be contributing irrelevant nonsense.
Don't judge me for being "binary" if you are unable to discriminate between what is right and wrong, between the murderer and the victim.
Ashkelon, Israel: It is the radio advertisement Israeli authorities do not want their citizens to hear.
In a quiet voice, a woman speaking in Hebrew reads the names and ages of just a few of the more than 190 Palestinian children killed in Gaza in the last two weeks of intensive Israeli air strikes.
Describing the ad’s content as “politically controversial”, the Israeli Broadcasting Authority banned the 1 minute, 25-second spot produced by local human rights group B’Tselem.
Mohammed Shinbary comforts his daughter Mahasin, 7, who was injured after an attack on a United Nations school. Photo: New York Times
But although the Palestinian child victims of this latest round of Israeli air strikes and Hamas rocket barrages will go unnamed in Israel's mainstream media, their toll grows by the day.
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At least 800 Palestinians have been killed, at least 605 of them civilians and 190 of them children, while 5250 have been injured, the Ministry of Health in Gaza said.
Aid agencies said a Palestinian child had been killed every hour over the last two days.
Six and a half years ago, shortly after Hamas won the Palestinian legislative elections and took charge of Gaza, a senior Israeli official described Israel’s planned response. “The idea,” he said, “is to put the Palestinians on a diet, but not to make them die of hunger.”
Although Dov Weisglass was adviser to Ehud Olmert, the prime minister of the day, few observers treated his comment as more than hyperbole, a supposedly droll characterization of the blockade Israel was about to impose on the tiny enclave.
Last week, however, the evidence finally emerged to prove that this did indeed become Israeli policy. After a three-year legal battle by an Israeli human rights group, Israel was forced to disclose its so-called “Red Lines” document. Drafted in early 2008, as the blockade was tightened still further, the defense ministry paper set forth proposals on how to treat Hamas-ruled Gaza.
The fine print
Health officials provided calculations of the minimum number of calories needed by Gaza’s 1.5 million inhabitants to avoid malnutrition. Those figures were then translated into truckloads of food Israel was supposed to allow in each day.
The Israeli media have tried to present these chilling discussions, held in secret, in the best light possible. Even the liberal Haaretz newspaper euphemistically described this extreme form of calorie-counting as designed to “make sure Gaza didn’t starve.”
But a rather different picture emerges as one reads the small print. While the health ministry determined that Gazans needed daily an average of 2,279 calories each to avoid malnutrition — requiring 170 trucks a day — military officials then found a host of pretexts to whittle down the trucks to a fraction of the original figure.
The reality was that, in this period, an average of only 67 trucks — much less than half of the minimum requirement — entered Gaza daily. This compared to more than 400 trucks before the blockade began.
To achieve this large reduction, officials deducted trucks based both on an over-generous assessment of how much food could be grown locally and on differences in the “culture and experience” of food consumption in Gaza, a rationale never explained.
The media is referred to in our Constitution because in a democracy, journalism’s role is to protect the interests of the people to essentially hold those in power accountable. When our media portrays murder as defense, and defense as murder, we know the media is not being truthful to its citizens and is not acting as a government watchdog, but rather as a government lapdog. As the Obama administration pledges to continue aid to Israel at a rate of $3 billion a year, despite calls by Israeli lawmakers for a genocide of Arabs in this conflict, many journalists of conscience can’t help but ask: Is the U.S. government complicit in these calls for genocide?
In the last month alone, our media has ignored the truth about the violence in Gaza and what led to this current round of violence. Why are we staying silent? When Israel’s assault began on Gaza nearly two weeks ago, American media headlines manipulated the narrative of this conflict to make Israeli lives seem more valuable than that of Palestinians. Here are few headlines told half truths:
The New York Times led with “Death Toll Rises in Gaza, as Hamas Hits New Targets in Israel,” placing all blame for Palestinian casualties on Hamas’ actions instead of saying that the Israeli bombing attacks is a form of collective punishment that actually killed those civilians.
The Wall Street Journal led with “Israel Targets Gaza Rocket Launchers,” not mentioning the Israeli rockets that have targeted civilian homes in Gaza.
The Los Angeles Times ran “Palestinian rockets reach farther into Israel,” reporting that the homemade rockets have not killed a single person, but failing to mention the American-funded Israeli missiles that have left over nearly 600 Palestinians — mostly women and children — dead in Gaza.
Although the majority of alternative and independent media organizations have started to refer to Israel as an apartheid state in the last 5 years, the mainstream media is trailing far behind and does not question the U.S. government’s complicity in apartheid.
My story of what I witnessed and what I lived through is only one of thousands of life under occupation. As I watch the events unfold in the Holy Land today and how the media continues to be complicit in Israeli war crimes in Gaza, many journalists, academics, human rights groups and peace advocacy groups wonder if this is to numb America to the real horrors our military aid is contributing to in the land that is so dear to the entire world.
Is that the best you can do Volunteer? Bring two regional issues against each other with no analysis, no knowledge, no proof of your point? You are completely besides the point, but I'll humour this for a bit.
What do you know of Sunnis chopping off the heads of Shia? Firstly, these so-called "Sunnis" -the ISIL, Al Nusrah and their like- are chopping off Sunni heads before Shia's. Secondly, while, yes, they are completely motivated by religious fanaticism, they are a very small minority amongst the Sunnis and so you have to ask yourself why they got so powerful. The response here is no longer religious. Look for the who was responsible for their flourishing, their empowerment, their subvention: US and its regional lapdogs: Qatar, Turkey and Saudi Arabia conjoined in a plan to fragment Iraq and Syria to cut off the Iran-Iraq-Syria resistance continuum. Without the US and its support, backing of these terrorists - in Afghanistan first, in Libya, in Syria and in Iraq. The US is complicit in cultivating extremist takfiri Islam - which doesnt cover Hamas as a resistance faction. The US actually likes having ISIL and its like in the region - because they bleed the region and weaken it, defragment it, making it drift away from resisting its plans in the area, Israel being the prominent one.
The irony is that the US (and before it Britain) is at the root of the empowerment of extremist takfiri Islam AND at the same time at the root of Islamophobia. They feed the monster AND the fear from the monster in order to harness both to serve their material ends.
Continue to speak out of your behind without knowing anything.
Submitted by Nora Barrows-Fr... on Thu, 07/24/2014 - 20:43
Relatives bury the bodies of two Palestinian boys, Abdulrahamn Abed al-Nabi, 1, and Hadi Abed al-Nabi, 3, who medics said were killed in an Israeli air strike in northern Gaza on Thursday.
The Israeli military on Wednesday completely destroyed the al-Wafa rehabilitation and geriatric hospital in the eastern Gaza City neighborhood of Shujaiya after weeks of missile strikes on the hospital and the forced evacuation of the patients, caregivers and hospital staff last week.
The Israeli daily Haaretzreported that the Israeli military claimed the hospital buildings were “being used as a Hamas command center and rocket-launching site.” However, the hospital director, Dr. Basman Alashi, says that Israel has targeted the hospital based on false and misleading claims.
Activists with the International Solidarity Movement, who have been working closely with al-Wafa hospital staff and who attempted to prevent Israel from shelling the hospital two weeks ago, stated in a press release on Wednesday (including the photo below) that:
On the 21 July at 2:17 PM, the IDF spokesperson released an image on twittershowing an aerial picture of a building marked as “Al-Wafa” hospital. In the image there is a red circle, which they designated as the location from which an M75 rocket was launched.
The building in the picture marked “Al-Wafa” hospital is in fact not the el-Wafa hospital but the Right to Life Society.
Archinect, please boycott Israel (its about time!)
CD.Arch, if its a matter of "challenging" for you. so be it. You've been challenging with lies, petty attacks, and your complete and utter lack of logic. You view this as you being challenging; I personally find it about you being challenged, morally-challenged and intellectually-challenged.
How can anyone not view an entity killing kids in the hundreds as a despicable, abhorrent entity that deserves to be isolated, cornered and condemned internationally?
140 Irish academics pledge to boycott Israeli institutions and that was back in Feb 2014
First stage of fanaticism:
"I am very solid in my morals"
It is getting little bit entertaining now.
i don't know that there are stages of fanaticism, but wikipedia says:
George Santayana defines fanaticism as "redoubling your effort when you have forgotten your aim";[1]
according to Winston Churchill, "A fanatic is one who can't change his mind and won't change the subject"
CD.Arch;
As I said earlier, I do not agree with the civilian casualties. Much like Curtkram said, there are ways that Palestine could reduce the civilian casualties,
So, you "don't agree" (whatever that means) with the (Palestinian) civilian casualties and yet instead of directly blaming the party responsible for shooting into the civilian population, killing, deliberately, intentionally, you blame the Palestinians themselves? Yes, I can see how your fit for intellectual challanges.
The purpose of the Gaza doctrine is straightforward: disproportionate force is used to cause terror among the civilian population to exert political pressure on the authorities in Gaza.
This policy of collective punishment, of deliberately causing terror, is unequivocally illegal but it is all too real.
"and I think they should take that route, and not have fired missiles back. I know you disagree, but the years leading up to Israel's attacks right now have been chiefly attacks made by Palestine."
Prove it. Prove that Gaza was not under seige, prove that its population was not being near-starved, prove that they were being attacked every now , that Israel was assassinating Palestinians in Gaza well before this murderous spree,. Prove this guy wrong. And the greater picture? Prove that Palestinians were't terrorized, deported, displaced internally and deported externally. Prove that their lands werent stolen. Prove that Israelis didn't subject Palestinians to a system of systemic oppression, ghettoization, forced impoverishment. The onus is you to prove all this because the world community knows this, although their governments. You want to place the blame on the victim because you support the murderer for your own reasons - I understand that, your choice...but, its kind of difficult to sell this sort of psychopathic "reasoning" as being rational. So just be honest, and state that you don't really care about the Palestinian civilians - which you really aren't; if you were, your first and immediate concern would be the gun pointing at them- and that you're fine with them being eliminated. At least I would have more respect for you intellectually; you would be, as you are now, a psychopath, but at least without sleazily covering it up.
"My biggest problem is with the way that you go about it, like condemning everyone and anyone that backs Israel and saying that they are racist."
Whoever supports a racist ideology, and to top it a colonial racist ideology, is racist. How did I go about it? Did I insult your through character assassination, through pettiness? Not at all, I'm just calling it out as it is. If you're a pro-Zionist, you're a pro-racist colonial nationalism, you de facto become racist. If you render the Palestinian rights invisible because, as you say, you "support Israel", and you can't recognize the rights of Palestinians to be on their lands and to defend their right to be on their lands because you prefer Israel...then yes, you are racist. To be pro-Zionist is de facto to be anti-Palestinian; you let your ethnic and cultural preference rule your opinion, not human rights, which includes the rights to live without oppression, the right to ownership without violation, etc.
" Please correct me on that if I'm wrong. If that is true, then how were the intentions or results of Zionism racist? Why is it Zionism that has led to the destruction of Palestine?"
I've done your homework in many of my posts above (also refer to this page). If you haven't read them, read them, If you have read them and choose to ignore them, then it is not a question of you wanting to understanding but of you wanting to defend your irrational belief no matter what I have to say.
http://www.tpnn.com/2014/07/23/video-everything-you-need-to-know-about-the-israeli-palestinian-conflict-easily-explained-in-five-minutes/
Sorry if it doesn't come out as a link
That video is of course based on pro-Zionist lies. 'Zionism always wanted to colonize Palestine entire (and even more). The only thing that "killed" (which was never really on the table for Israel) the two-state solution is the dispersal of settlement colonies calculated to rip Palestine apart. The talk of the two state solution has always been one of those mirages that get thrown around to trick and deceive. Below:
The notion of having a two-state solution established in the Land of Israel is now at a dead end; never in Jewish history have so many people talked so much and expended so much energy in something so futile,
Yesterday Naftali Bennett of the Jewish Home party became the latest member of Israel’s cabinet to call for an end to the pretense that a “two-state solution” could be a ‘solution’ in any sense.
The notion of having a two-state solution established in the Land of Israel is now at a dead end; never in Jewish history have so many people talked so much and expended so much energy in something so futile,
he said. Instead,
Bennett reiterated his stance that Israel should annex — “as quickly as possible” — virtually all the areas [Area C] that were not handed over the Palestinian Authority under the Oslo accords, including the Jewish communities and a handful of Palestinian towns. He further advocated that Israel devise “aggressive” new plans to drastically improve the economic well-being of both the Jewish and Arab inhabitants of Judea and Samaria.
Bennett said that Israel must continue its settlement activity in Judea and Samaria “in full force, because only facts on the ground would make everyone understand that it is an unrealistic proposition to have a Palestinian entity in the Land of Israel.”
Netanyahu Abandons the Pretense of a Two-State Solution
Snippet:
Nomika Zion, a resident of the Israeli border town of Sderot and a member of the Israeli peace group Other Voice, recently asked in an open letter to Prime Minister Binyamin Netanyahu, "How has a nation that has occupied other people's territory for 45 years continued to tell itself, with such deep conviction, that we are the single and ultimate victim in this story?"
One answer is that Israel is a nation that from the beginning has justified its actions with myths.
First there was the myth of an empty land, a Palestine without Palestinians, where the Jewish survivors of the Holocaust found a desert and made it bloom. The people who had inhabited that land for centuries were erased from the record, along with their age-old olive trees and citrus orchards, their shops and businesses, villages and towns.
The founding myth, reinforced by the expulsion of nearly half a million Arabs, was followed by another: that Israel's neighbors were bent on driving the tiny state into the sea. Since Israel's survival is at stake, any action it takes to defend itself is therefore justified.
In 1967 the Israelis used the pretext of an imminent attack by Egypt to launch a war with that country, and proceeded to defeat three Arab armies and capture the West Bank, Gaza, and Syria's Golan Heights, acquiring valuable water sources as a result. Yet the myth of Israel's vulnerability lived on. Today, with Palestinians locked behind barriers and checkpoints, deprived of their freedom and at the mercy of the Israeli army, Israel remains the victim.That image, carefully nurtured by the Israel lobby, is reflected in Washington's pledge to assure Israel's military dominance in the region—regardless of the cost.
Furthermore, the two-state solution is, from my point of view unethical...for many reasons. Firstly, it will never be a solution. There will not be peace, not for anyone. Secondly, Palestinians have the right of return to their cities and villages anywhere in historic Palestine. This is where they owned property, this is where their lands were stolen.
(Reuters) - Gazan authorities said Israeli forces shelled a shelter at a U.N.-run school, killing at least 15 people, as the Palestinian death toll in the conflict reached 796 and attempts at a truce remained elusive.
Archinect, you continue to establish a state of normalcy with Israeli businesses and institutions that are enmeshed within a colonial racist system oppressing a whole people, killing children in their hundreds, destroying homes and livelihoods. You are indirectly contributing to this. Please boycott Israeli businesses and institutions.
Archinect has nothing to do with sovereign states of the world.
Here, the only border is the borders of the internet because here there is no nations or countries. It is simply the domain of the information super highway.
This forum and website is simply borderless and open wherever there is an on ramp to the information super highway.
did he really say
"As I said earlier, I do not agree with the civilian casualties. Much like Curtkram said, there are ways that Palestine could reduce the civilian casualties"
?
Sure they could, but can they trust Israel who doesn't even treat them as second class citizens under apartheid? Palestinians are forced to live in sort of "open air prisons."
There is a very clear progression of the history here. Everything, including theories, ideas and facts since the late 1800s are well recorded and archived. In them, you can see a lot of interference and unjust exchanges of land which still continues today via ever expanding settlements and illegal acquisitions. Turks have a considerable record of land deeds and parcel maps in their archives. Ottomans were pretty good at keeping records. Clearly, abduction of Moslem and Christian lands by British and later by Jewish settlers are well recorded and down to satellite images these days.
Now is the dirtiest of the deeds time. Considerable extermination is openly considered and started. The idea of getting rid of Palestinians forever is underway. This is what powers that be in Israel are putting their weight and efforts. How stupid of them. This is the beginning of the end of Israeli policies and Jewish conundrum in the region.
You can look at it positively. I do. In order for Jews to co-exist in the region for a long term, they have to make peace. A "just peace" that satisfies all Palestinians. Israel and Jewish diaspora are changing. It is a society with different political camps but all grew up with the threat of being wiped off. Afterall the impact of Holocaust is nowhere near of being forgotten and that is not only healthy for Jews but all of us regardless of religion, race and nationality to be aware of our evil nature.
I personally want Israel to survive and eradicate and learn from the bad blood between Israelis and Palestinians. I see a peaceful Israel as an asset to region but in the light of today's landscape I also feel sort of hopelessness and lack of vision in those who have access to armory, triggers and ammo.
It is urgent that Israel comes to terms with peace because the region is fast radicalizing itself like it never seen before. Forces like ISIS might soon be an established entity in Israel's doorstep and they will come not with Kassams and AK47's but much more lethal armory with techno accessories and battle experience perhaps turning the region into a bloodbath. This is happening at Israel's doorstep right now. And what Netanyahu and his fanatical cabinet are doing? Blowing up Palestinian women, children in Gaza and spending its whatever credibility and image like a nouveau riche wreckless bully.
Question is, will the population in Israel which is very westernized be able to stay in Israel and fight bloody wars against the most graphically brutal of the enemies continuously like a highly militarized warrior nation or opt out for a peaceful immigration to Spain, US or other places who will accept them with minimal immigration requirements? Do you see the dangers here? There is, so far, nobody here with the exception of tammuz, myself and few others addressed these dangers yet and made pleas for "just" peace and ultimately cared for Israel and the survival of the reason in the region.
By the way, Richard Balkins, Assoc. AIA reminds me and is very promising as the new Per Correll. Hi Richard welcome to Archinect.
Is Gideon Levy the most hated man in Israel or just the most heroic?
Images from Gaza should trouble every Israeli
Israeli hearts are brimming with concern for Israeli soldiers in Gaza; but they have no compassion for victims on the other side, not even for children who are dying in gruesome numbers.
by Gideon Levy
http://www.haaretz.com/mobile/.premium-1.606848?v=747F2BB12A33B56FAA93DBF1585507A2
“We want an international airport, we want a seaport, we want an opening to the outside world, and not the situation where we are controlled by a few border crossings that turn Gaza into a huge prison, where no one can leave even for medical treatment or to work […] When we get a clearly worded drafting that guarantees these things, and the international community gives its backing to this draft – than the fire can be stopped, even today..."
-Hamas political bureau head Khaled Meshaal
Loud Noises!
From http://mondoweiss.net/2014/07/jews-apartheid-israel.html Statement of Jews for Palestinian Right of Return, July 22, 2014 (200 initial signers, endorsing allies forthcoming) On July 12, 2014, Gaza civil society issued an urgent appeal for solidarity, asking: “How many of our lives are dispensable enough until the world takes action? How much of our blood is sufficient?” As Jews of conscience, we answer by unequivocally condemning Israel’s ongoing massacre in Gaza, whose victims include hundreds of civilians, children, entire families, the elderly, and the disabled. This latest toll adds to the thousands Israel has killed and maimed since its supposed withdrawal from the Gaza Strip in 2005. In response to this crisis, we urgently reaffirm our support for a ban on all military and other aid to Israel. In 1967, Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. opposed the Vietnam War with his famous declaration: “For the sake of the hundreds of thousands trembling under our violence, I cannot be silent.” Today, *we* cannot be silent as the “Jewish state” — armed to the teeth by the U.S. and its allies — wages yet another brutal war on the Palestinian people. Apartheid Israel does not speak for us, and we stand with Gaza as we stand with all of Palestine. In the face of incessant pro-Israel propaganda, we heed Malcolm X’s warning: “If you’re not careful, the newspapers will have you hating the people who are being oppressed, and loving the people who are doing the oppressing.” For Israel’s relentless war on Gaza is no more an act of “self-defense” than such infamous massacres as Wounded Knee (1890), Guernica (1937), the Warsaw Ghetto (1942), Deir Yassin (1948), My Lai (1968), Soweto (1976), Sabra and Shatila (1982), or Lebanon (2006). Rather, it is but the latest chapter in more than a century of Zionist colonialism, dispossession, ethnic cleaning, racism, and genocide — including Israel’s very establishment through the uprooting and displacement of over 750,000 Palestinians during the 1947-1948 Nakba. Indeed, eighty percent of the 1.8 million people sealed into Gaza are refugees. Like any colonial regime, Israel uses resistance to such policies as an excuse to terrorize and collectively punish the indigenous population for its very existence. But scattered rockets, fired from Gaza into land stolen from Palestinians in the first place, are merely a response to this systemic injustice. From To confront the root cause of this violence, we call for the complete dismantling of Israel’s apartheid regime, throughout historic Palestine — from the River to the Sea. With that in mind, we embrace the 2005 Palestinian call for Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions (BDS) campaign, which demands: * An end to Israeli military occupation of the 1967 territories * Full equality for Palestinian citizens of Israel * Right of return for Palestinian refugees, as affirmed by UN resolution 194
Contd Sign petition at http://chn.ge/1o76rOC Initial Signers (list in formation; organizations, schools and other affiliations shown for identification only; *Co-founder, Jews for Palestinian Right of Return) Avigail Abarbanel, Psychotherapist; editor, Beyond Tribal Loyalties: Personal Stories of Jewish Peace Activists (2012, Cambridge Scholars), Inverness, ScotlandNoa Abend, Boycott From WithinStephen Aberle, Independent Jewish Voices; Vancouver, BCLisa Albrecht, Ph.D. Social Justice Program, University of MinnesotaAnya Achtenberg, novelist and poet; teacher; activist; International Jewish Anti-Zionist NetworkMike Alewitz, Associate Professor, Central CT State Unversity; Artistic Director, Labor Art & Mural ProjectZalman Amit, Distinguished Professor Emeritus; Author, Israeli RejectionismAnthony ArnoveGabriel Ash, International Jewish Anti-Zionist Network, SwitzerlandTed Auerbach, Brooklyn for PeaceAnna Baltzer, author and organizerRonnie Barkan, Co-founder, Boycott from Within, Tel-AvivJudith Bello, Administrative Committee, United National Antiwar CoalitionLawrence Boxall, Independent Jewish Voices, Canada; Vancouver Ecosocialist GroupLinda BenediktNora Barrows-Friedman, journalist; OaklandProf. Jonathan Beller, Humanities and Media Studies Graduate Program in Media Studies, Pratt Institute, BrooklynMedea Benjamin, co-founder, CODEPINKRica Bird, Joint Founder, Merseyside Jews for Peace and JusticeAudrey Bomse, Co-chair, National Lawyers Guild Palestine SubcommitteeProf. Daniel Boyarin, Taubman Professor of Talmudic Culture, UC BerkeleyLenni Brenner, Author, Zionism In The Age Of The DictatorsElizabeth Block, Independent Jewish Voices, Toronto ONMax Blumenthal, Author, Goliath: Life and Loathing in Greater Israel; and Senior Writer for Alternet.orgMary P. Buchwald, Jewish Voice for Peace-New YorkMonique Buckner, BDS South AfricaMaia Brown, Health and Human Rights Project-Seattle & Stop Veolia SeattleEstee Chandler, Jewish Voice for Peace, Los AngelesRick Chertoff, L..A. Jews for PeaceProf. Marjorie Cohn, Thomas Jefferson School of Law; past president, National Lawyers GuildAlly Cohen, Ramallah, Palestine; International Solidarity Movement media coordinatorRuben Rosenberg Colorni, Youth for Palestine, NetherlandsMike Cushman, Convenor, Jews for Boycotting Israeli Goods (UK)Margaretta D’arcy, Irish actress, writer, playwright, and peace-activistNatalie Zemon DavisWarren Davis, labor and political activist, Philadelphia, PAEron DavidsonJudith Deutsch, Independent Jewish Voices Canada; Science for PeaceRoger Dittmann, Professor of Physics, Emeritus California State University, Fullerton; President, Scholars and Scientists without Borders Executive Council, World Federation of Scientific WorkersGordon Doctorow, Ed.D., CanadaMark Elf, Jews Sans Frontieres, London, UKHedy Epstein, Nazi Holocaust survivor and human rights activist; St. Louis, MOMarla ErlienShelley EttingerInge Etzbach, Human Rights Activist, Café Palestina NYRichard Falk, Professor of International Law, Emeritus, Princeton University; Former UN Special Rapporteur on Occupied Palestine, 2008-2014Malkah B. Feldman, Jewish Voice for Peace and recent delegate to Palestine with American Jews For A Just PeaceDeborah Fink, Co-Founder, Jews for Boycotting Israeli Goods UKJoel Finkel, Jewish Voice for Peace-ChicagoSylvia Finzi, JfjfP; Jüdische Stimme für gerechten Frieden in Nahost, EJJP. Germany)Maxine Fookson, Pediatric Nurse Practitioner; Jewish Voice for Peace, Portland OR-Richard Forer, Author, Breakthrough: Transforming Fear Into Compassion – A New Perspective on the Israel-PalestineSid Frankel, Associate Professor, University of ManitobaProf. Cynthia Franklin, Co-Editor, Biography: An Interdisciplinary Quarterly, University of Hawai’iRacheli Gai, Jewish Voice for PeaceHerb Gamberg, Independent Jewish Voices, CanadaRuth Gamberg, Independent Jewish Voices, CanadaLee GargaglianoCheryl Gaster, social justice activist and human right lawyer, Toronto ONAlisa Gayle-Deutsch, American/Canadian Musician and Anti-Israeli Apartheid ActivistJack Gegenberg, Professor of Mathematics, University of New Brunswick, Fredericton NBProf. Terri Ginsberg, film and media scholar, New YorkDavid Glick, psychotherapist; Jewish Voice for PeaceSherna Berger Gluck, Emerita Professor, CSULB; Israel Divestment CampaignNeta Golan, Ramallah, Palestine; Jews Against Genocide; Co-founder, International Solidarity Movement.Tsilli GoldenbergSteve Goldfield, Ph.D.Sue Goldstein, International Jewish Anti-Zionist Network, CanadaMarty Goodman, former Executive Board member, Transport Workers Union Local 100; Socialist ActionRabbi Lynn Gottlieb, Freeman Fellow, Fellowship of ReconciliationHector Grad, International Jewish Anti-Zionist Network, SpainProf. Jesse GreenerCathy GulkinIra Grupper, Bellarmine University, Louisville, KYJeff Halper, The Israeli Committee Against House demolitions (ICAHD)Larry Haiven, Independent Jewish Voices Canada, HalifaxEvelyn Hecht-Galinski, publisher, GermanyStanley Heller, The Struggle Video News TSVNShir Hever, Jewish Voice for Just Peace, GermanyDeborah Hrbek, media and civil rights lawyer, NLG-NYCDr. Tikva Honig-Parass, Jews for Palestinian Right of ReturnAdam Horowitz, Co-Editor, MondoweissGilad IsaacsSelma JamesJake Javanshir, Independent Jewish Voices, TorontoRiva JoffeVal Jonas, attorney, Miami BeachSima Kahn, MD; President of the board, Kadima Reconstructionist CommunityYael Kahn, Israeli anti-apartheid activistMichael KalmanovitzDan KaplanSusan Kaplan, J.D. National Lawyers GuildDanny Katch, activist and authorBruce Katz, President, Palestinian and Jewish Unity (PAJU), Montreal, CanadaLynn Kessler, Ph.D., MPH, psychologist/social justice activistJanet Klecker, Sonomans for Justice & Peace for Palestine, Sonoma CAProf. David Klein, California State University, Northridge; USACBIEmma Klein, Jewish Voice for Peace, Seattle WASara KershnarHarry KopytoRichard Koritz, veteran postal trade unionist and former member of North Carolina Human Relations CommissionYael Korin, PhD., Scientist at UCLA; Campaign to End IsraelI Apartheid, Southern CaliforniaDennis Kortheuer, CSULB, Israel Divestment CampaignSteve Kowit, Professor Emeritus, Jewish Voice for PeaceToby KramerJason Kunin, Independent Jewish Voices CanadaDr. David Landy, Trinity College, DublinJean Léger, Coalition pour la Justice et la Paix en Palestine, membre de la Coalition BDS Québec et de Palestiniens et Juifs UnisLynda Lemberg, Educators for Peace and Justice, Independent Jewish Voices, Toronto ONDavid Letwin,* activist and teacher, Al-Awda NYMichael Letwin,* former President, Association of Legal Aid Attorneys/UAW Local 2325; USACBI; Al-Awda NYLes Levidow, Jews for Boycotting Israeli Goods (J-BIG), UKCorey Levine, Human Rights Activist, Writer; National Steering Committee, Independent Jewish Voices CanadaJoseph Levine, Professor of Philosophy, University of Massachusetts AmherstLesley Levy, Independent Jewish Voices, MontrealMich Levy, teacher, Oakland CAAbby Lippman, Professor Emerita; activist; MontrealBrooke Lober, PhD candidate, University of Arizona, Gender and Women’s Studies DepartmentAntony Loewenstein, journalist, author and Guardian columnistJennifer Loewenstein, Professor of Middle Eastern Studies, University of Wisconsin, MadisonAlex Lubin, Professor of American Studies, University of New MeixcoAndrew Lugg, Professor Emeritus, University of Ottawa, CanadaDavid Makofsky, Jewish Voice for Peace, Research AnthropologistHarriet Malinowitz, Professor of English, Long Island University, BrooklynMike Marqusee, Author, If I Am Not for Myself: Journey of an Anti-Zionist JewMiriam Marton, JDDr. Richard Matthews. independent scholar, London ONDaniel L. Meyers, Former President National Lawyers Guild-NYCLinda Milazzo, Writer/Activist/Educator, Los AngelesEva Steiner Moseley, Holocaust refugee, Massachusetts Peace Action board member and Palestine/Israel Working GroupDr. Dorothy Naor, retired teacher, Herzliah, IsraelMarcy Newman, independent scholar; Author; The Politics of Teaching Palestine to AmericansAlex Nissen, Women in BlackDr. Judith NormanHenry Norr, retired journalist, Berkeley CAMichael Novick, Anti-Racist Action-Los Angeles/People Against Racist TerrorProf. Bertell OllmanKarin PallyProf. Ilan Pappé, Israeli historian and socialist activistKaren Platt, Jewish Voice for Peace, Albany CADr. Susan Pashkoff, Jews Against Zionism, London UKMiko Peled, writer, activist; Author, The General’s Son: Journey of an Israeli in PalestineProf. Gabriel PiterbergMitch Podolak, Founder, Winnipeg Folk Festival and Vancouver Folk Music FestivalKaren Pomer,* granddaughter of Henri B. van Leeuwen, Dutch anti-Zionist leader and Bergen-Belsen survivorLenny PotashFabienne Presentey, Independent Jewish Voices, MontréalDiana Ralph, Independent Jewish Voices CanadaRoland Rance, Jews Against Zionism, LondonKaren Ranucci, Independent Journalist, Democracy Now!Ana Ratner, Artist, Puppeteer, Activist.Michael Ratner, President Emeritus, Center for Constitutional RightsProf. Dr. Fanny-Michaela ReisinDiana M.A. Relke, Professor Emerita, University of SaskatchewanProf. Bruce Robbins, Columbia UniversityStewart M. Robinson, retired Prof of MathematicsProfessor Lisa RofelMimi Rosenberg, Producer & Host, Building Bridges and Wednesday Edition, WBAI 99.5 FM; Association of Legal Aid Attorneys/UAW Local 2325Lillian Rosengarten, Author, From The Shadows Of Nazi Germany To The Jewish Boat To GazaProf. Jonathan Rosenhead, British Committee for the Universities of Palestine (BRICUP)Yehoahua RosinIlana RossoffMartha Roth, Independent Jewish Voices; Vancouver BCMarty Roth, Emeritus professor of English, University of MinnesotaRuben Roth, Assistant Professor, Labour Studies, Laurentian University; Independent Jewish Voices CanadaEmma RubinCheryl A. Rubenberg, Middle East Scholar; Editor, Encyclopedia of the Israeli-Palestinian Conflict; Author, The Palestinians in Search of a Just PeaceJosh Ruebner, Author, Shattered Hopes: Obama’s Failure to Broker Israeli-Palestinian PeaceMark Rudd, retired teacher, Albuquerque NMBen Saifer, Independent Jewish Voices CanadaEvalyn Segal, Sylvia SchwarzYossi SchwartzCarole Seligman, co-editor, Socialist Viewpoint magazineYom Shamash, Independent Jewish Voices, Vancouver, CanadaTali Shapiro, Boycott from Within; IsraelKaren Shenfeld, Poet, Toronto ONSid Shniad, National Steering Committee, Independent Jewish Voices CanadaWilliam Shookhoff, Independent Jewish Voices, Toronto ONMelinda Smith, Jewish Voice for Peace, Albuquerque NMKobi SnitzMarsha Steinberg, BDS-LA for Justice in Palestine, Los AngelesLotta StrandbergCarol Stone, Independent Jewish Voices, Vancouver BCMiriam (Cherkes-Julkowski) Swenson, Ph.D.Matthew TaylorLaura Tillem, Peace and Social Justice Center of South Central KansasPeter Trainor, Independent Jewish Voices, TorontoRebecca Tumposky,Darlene Wallach, Justice for Palestinians, San Jose CADr. Abraham Weizfeld, JPLOBonnie Weinstein, Co-Editor of Socialist Viewpoint magazine; Publisher, Bay Area United Against War NewsletterSam Weinstein, International Jewish Anti-Zionist Network-Labor; former President, UWUA Local 132Judith Weisman, Independent Jewish Voices; Not in Our Name (NION); Toronto ONPaul Werner, PhD, DSFS Editor, WOID, a journal of visual languageNoga Wizansky, Ph.D., artist, instructor, and researcher; Administrator, Institute of European Studies, UC BerkeleyMarcy Winograd, public school teacher, former congressional peace candidateBekah Wolf, UC Hastings College of Law Student; Co-founder, Palestine Solidarity ProjectSherry WolfDave Zirin, Author, Game Over: How Politics Have Turned the Sports World Upside Down
Louder noises
So, after 30+ posts a day, you hotshots can't get archinect to boycott Israel? I guess you don't have a future in politics.
led signal light,
I have been on this forum for quite some time already.
:)
Israel
Merica
.
From : http://imeu.org/article/the-nakba-65-years-of-dispossession-and-apartheid 65 Years of Apartheid in the Holy Land Over the entirety of its 65-year existence, there has been a period of only about one year (1966-67) that Israel has not ruled over large numbers of Palestinians to whom it granted no political rights simply because they are not Jewish. From 1948 to 1966, Palestinian citizens of Israel were ruled by martial law, similar to the Israeli military regime that millions of Palestinians living in the occupied West Bank, East Jerusalem, and Gaza have been subject to since 1967.The United Nations International Convention on the Suppression and Punishment of the Crime of Apartheid (1973) defines apartheid as "inhuman acts committed for the purpose of establishing and maintaining domination by one racial group of persons over any other racial group of persons and systematically oppressing them."According to a 2010 Human Rights Watch report, "Separate and Unequal: Israel's Discriminatory Treatment of Palestinians in the Occupied Palestinian Territories":"Palestinians face systematic discrimination merely because of their race, ethnicity, and national origin depriving them of electricity, water, schools, and access to roads, while nearby Jewish settlers enjoy all of these state-provided benefits While Israeli settlements flourish, Palestinians under Israeli control live in a time warp - not just separate, not just unequal, but sometimes even pushed off their lands and out of their homes."Many Israelis, including senior political leaders, have compared Israel's military rule over Palestinians in the occupied territories to apartheid. One of the first people to use the word "apartheid" in relation to Israel was Israel's first prime minister, David Ben-Gurion, who warned following the 1967 War of Israel becoming an "apartheid state" if it retained control of the occupied territories.In 1999, then-Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Barak stated: "Every attempt to keep hold of this area [Israel and the occupied territories] as one political entity leads, necessarily, to either a nondemocratic or a non-Jewish state. Because if the Palestinians vote, then it is a binational state, and if they don't vote it is an apartheid state." In 2010, Barak repeated the apartheid comparison, stating: "As long as in this territory west of the Jordan river there is only one political entity called Israel it is going to be either non-Jewish, or non-democratic If this bloc of millions of Palestinians cannot vote, that will be an apartheid state."Others who have compared Israel's treatment of Palestinians to apartheid include former US President Jimmy Carter, who in 2006 published a book entitled, "Palestine Peace Not Apartheid," as well as many veterans of the anti-apartheid movement in South Africa, such as Archbishop Emeritus Desmond Tutu, one of the heroes of the struggle against South African apartheid, who has repeatedly made the comparison.
So... Tammuz, you reject the two state solution, and basically want Israel wiped off the map. Why, then, do they not have the right to fight back against people like yourself? Are you just mad because they won't like up neatly for you and be slaughtered?
If you really want a war with Israel, then grow a pair and go fight one... oh, that's right, you will lose. An Israeli tank will roll over your corpse seconds after you shout death to the infidel for the last time. So all you have left to do is call for a boycott on a forum that has nothing to do with the middle east...
Good that you're showing your true colours to others here, xian talking about my corpse being run over. And LITS4Forms telling me to strap a suicide belt and off myself. I'm glad you zionists show others your true selves. Not once have I wished or suggested or imagined anything of that sort to anyone, whether they share my opinion or not...but here you are, stuck in your hate-filled barbarism. Good job for exposing yourselves. Carry on with the good work. Counter information and reason with your irrational hate
You seem pretty good at cherry picking information in front of you and seeing only what you want to see. Other people see the same information and see how you've cherry picked it to create the picture you want, which is why you always sound like a nut, and you'll never be taken seriously.
Tammuz,
You think too binarily or black & white.
I am neither a zionist or an anti-zionist as the phrase is defined. Here is why?
I don't care whether there is an Israel or not or a Gaza strip or not. I can care less. Sure, I would prefer people to live and coexist in peace over killing and murdering. However, I don't control the will of those people there. They will do what they will do. If they don't want peace there will never be peace among them because they don't want it. They have to have sincere will for peace but if they don't it will never happen.
When I die, my soul will neither be in heaven, hell, Sheol, or Earth as depicted in the Bible, Torah, or the Qur'an. It will be elsewhere. That is as far as I will go.
Why are we even discussing this topic? I'm not your freedom fighter.
Bless you Richard but my comments were not targeted towards you. Please try to understand before criticizing on the basis of cliches that don't apply here. I could care less for religion - I bring this topic - a secular peaceful boycott of a racist colonial entity- in the midst of another chapter of genocide being committed against the Palestinians. Hundreds of children have been murdered . the number of overall casualties - the overriding majority of them civilian- is nearing a thousand. How many casualties on the Israeli side? And what percentage of them civilian?
Secondly, the larger picture: Who kicked whom out of their lands? Who stole whose land? Who is laying seige on a whole region, deliberately impoverishing them, near-starving them, turning water off them? Who is practicing a consistent policy of racial discrimination? Who creates massacre after massacre, whose sordid history is a list of massacres created against an indigenous people? Who is deceiving you with your media to portray this as a fight amongst equals, who deceives you with your media to make you assume this is about religion?
Who has the right to defend themselves against this oppression, against the slow murder of an entire people, country, culture called Palestine in order to set-up a racist colony?
Yes, I am absolutely binary because the history of Israel as a racist colony that came from europe with the intention, the power and the perseverence of kicking out the Palestinians to take over their lands is a binary one! There is absolutely no equivalence between the nature of an aggressor and a murdered and the victim who has all the right to defend themselves.
If you come back at me with the same redundant nonsense, please excuse me for not taking you seriously. I have taken the time to write this and I hope you take the time to let it sink in and then go do your own research if it interests you. Read the links that Im bothering to insert here and ponder over it. If it doesn't interest you, then you really dont need to be contributing irrelevant nonsense.
Don't judge me for being "binary" if you are unable to discriminate between what is right and wrong, between the murderer and the victim.
Israel bans radio ad listing dead children's names
Ashkelon, Israel: It is the radio advertisement Israeli authorities do not want their citizens to hear.
In a quiet voice, a woman speaking in Hebrew reads the names and ages of just a few of the more than 190 Palestinian children killed in Gaza in the last two weeks of intensive Israeli air strikes.
Describing the ad’s content as “politically controversial”, the Israeli Broadcasting Authority banned the 1 minute, 25-second spot produced by local human rights group B’Tselem.
Mohammed Shinbary comforts his daughter Mahasin, 7, who was injured after an attack on a United Nations school. Photo: New York Times
But although the Palestinian child victims of this latest round of Israeli air strikes and Hamas rocket barrages will go unnamed in Israel's mainstream media, their toll grows by the day.
Advertisement
At least 800 Palestinians have been killed, at least 605 of them civilians and 190 of them children, while 5250 have been injured, the Ministry of Health in Gaza said.
Aid agencies said a Palestinian child had been killed every hour over the last two days.
Read more: http://www.smh.com.au/world/israel-bans-radio-ad-listing-dead-childrens-names-20140725-zwns9.html#ixzz38Vgl5ol9
To repeat: Israel is killing One Palestinian child every hour
Alright Tammuz,
Lets try to keep it peaceful, though. Who started what ? God.... Oh well.... what happens when you're an absentee parent or absentee god/God/deity.
Who's land is it really? Lets go back in time and history on the matters to the beginning of the world.... what is 4.5+ Billion years ago.
I have concerns for the innocents on both sides of this issue.
Gaza Seige (before the still-ongoing massacre): Water
Gaza Seige (before the still-ongoing massacre): Israel’s starvation diet for Gaza
Six and a half years ago, shortly after Hamas won the Palestinian legislative elections and took charge of Gaza, a senior Israeli official described Israel’s planned response. “The idea,” he said, “is to put the Palestinians on a diet, but not to make them die of hunger.”
Although Dov Weisglass was adviser to Ehud Olmert, the prime minister of the day, few observers treated his comment as more than hyperbole, a supposedly droll characterization of the blockade Israel was about to impose on the tiny enclave.
Last week, however, the evidence finally emerged to prove that this did indeed become Israeli policy. After a three-year legal battle by an Israeli human rights group, Israel was forced to disclose its so-called “Red Lines” document. Drafted in early 2008, as the blockade was tightened still further, the defense ministry paper set forth proposals on how to treat Hamas-ruled Gaza.
The fine print
Health officials provided calculations of the minimum number of calories needed by Gaza’s 1.5 million inhabitants to avoid malnutrition. Those figures were then translated into truckloads of food Israel was supposed to allow in each day.
The Israeli media have tried to present these chilling discussions, held in secret, in the best light possible. Even the liberal Haaretz newspaper euphemistically described this extreme form of calorie-counting as designed to “make sure Gaza didn’t starve.”
But a rather different picture emerges as one reads the small print. While the health ministry determined that Gazans needed daily an average of 2,279 calories each to avoid malnutrition — requiring 170 trucks a day — military officials then found a host of pretexts to whittle down the trucks to a fraction of the original figure.
The reality was that, in this period, an average of only 67 trucks — much less than half of the minimum requirement — entered Gaza daily. This compared to more than 400 trucks before the blockade began.
To achieve this large reduction, officials deducted trucks based both on an over-generous assessment of how much food could be grown locally and on differences in the “culture and experience” of food consumption in Gaza, a rationale never explained.
Got to feel sorry for the kids brought up in either of these two miserable religions.
Volunteer, what is going on is not about religions. My goodness some of you are so brainwashed with zero understanding of whats going on.
Furthermore, I find your comment quite heinous and insulting to the religious jewish and moslem people here amongst us.
Complicity of US media in the the war crimes being committed by Israel in Gaza:
What The Media’s Getting Wrong About Israel And Palestine — And Why It Matters
The media is referred to in our Constitution because in a democracy, journalism’s role is to protect the interests of the people to essentially hold those in power accountable. When our media portrays murder as defense, and defense as murder, we know the media is not being truthful to its citizens and is not acting as a government watchdog, but rather as a government lapdog. As the Obama administration pledges to continue aid to Israel at a rate of $3 billion a year, despite calls by Israeli lawmakers for a genocide of Arabs in this conflict, many journalists of conscience can’t help but ask: Is the U.S. government complicit in these calls for genocide?
In the last month alone, our media has ignored the truth about the violence in Gaza and what led to this current round of violence. Why are we staying silent? When Israel’s assault began on Gaza nearly two weeks ago, American media headlines manipulated the narrative of this conflict to make Israeli lives seem more valuable than that of Palestinians. Here are few headlines told half truths:
Although the majority of alternative and independent media organizations have started to refer to Israel as an apartheid state in the last 5 years, the mainstream media is trailing far behind and does not question the U.S. government’s complicity in apartheid.
My story of what I witnessed and what I lived through is only one of thousands of life under occupation. As I watch the events unfold in the Holy Land today and how the media continues to be complicit in Israeli war crimes in Gaza, many journalists, academics, human rights groups and peace advocacy groups wonder if this is to numb America to the real horrors our military aid is contributing to in the land that is so dear to the entire world.
Of course, the children being referred to below are Palestinian children.
The Public Committee Against Torture in Israel (PCATI) published a report which claimed children suspected of minor crimes were subjected to “public caging”, threats and acts of sexual violence and military trials without representation.
...It said Israel was the only country to systematically prosecute children in its military courts, and added that “no Israeli children come into contact with the military court system”.
Of course it has nothing to do with religion. And the Sunnis chopping the heads off Shia in Iraq have nothing to do with religion either.
Is that the best you can do Volunteer? Bring two regional issues against each other with no analysis, no knowledge, no proof of your point? You are completely besides the point, but I'll humour this for a bit.
What do you know of Sunnis chopping off the heads of Shia? Firstly, these so-called "Sunnis" -the ISIL, Al Nusrah and their like- are chopping off Sunni heads before Shia's. Secondly, while, yes, they are completely motivated by religious fanaticism, they are a very small minority amongst the Sunnis and so you have to ask yourself why they got so powerful. The response here is no longer religious. Look for the who was responsible for their flourishing, their empowerment, their subvention: US and its regional lapdogs: Qatar, Turkey and Saudi Arabia conjoined in a plan to fragment Iraq and Syria to cut off the Iran-Iraq-Syria resistance continuum. Without the US and its support, backing of these terrorists - in Afghanistan first, in Libya, in Syria and in Iraq. The US is complicit in cultivating extremist takfiri Islam - which doesnt cover Hamas as a resistance faction. The US actually likes having ISIL and its like in the region - because they bleed the region and weaken it, defragment it, making it drift away from resisting its plans in the area, Israel being the prominent one.
The irony is that the US (and before it Britain) is at the root of the empowerment of extremist takfiri Islam AND at the same time at the root of Islamophobia. They feed the monster AND the fear from the monster in order to harness both to serve their material ends.
Continue to speak out of your behind without knowing anything.
Israel used fabricated images to justify bombing al-Wafa hospital
Submitted by Nora Barrows-Fr... on Thu, 07/24/2014 - 20:43
Relatives bury the bodies of two Palestinian boys, Abdulrahamn Abed al-Nabi, 1, and Hadi Abed al-Nabi, 3, who medics said were killed in an Israeli air strike in northern Gaza on Thursday.
(Ezz al-Zanoun / APA images)
The Israeli military on Wednesday completely destroyed the al-Wafa rehabilitation and geriatric hospital in the eastern Gaza City neighborhood of Shujaiya after weeks of missile strikes on the hospital and the forced evacuation of the patients, caregivers and hospital staff last week.
The Israeli daily Haaretz reported that the Israeli military claimed the hospital buildings were “being used as a Hamas command center and rocket-launching site.” However, the hospital director, Dr. Basman Alashi, says that Israel has targeted the hospital based on false and misleading claims.
Activists with the International Solidarity Movement, who have been working closely with al-Wafa hospital staff and who attempted to prevent Israel from shelling the hospital two weeks ago, stated in a press release on Wednesday (including the photo below) that:
On the 21 July at 2:17 PM, the IDF spokesperson released an image on twittershowing an aerial picture of a building marked as “Al-Wafa” hospital. In the image there is a red circle, which they designated as the location from which an M75 rocket was launched.
The building in the picture marked “Al-Wafa” hospital is in fact not the el-Wafa hospital but the Right to Life Society.
TAMMUZ, isn't there a temporary cease fire? Maybe you can give this forum a break too? Just a thought.
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